Great Lego Caper

By Brent Boynton&nbsp|&nbsp

Posted: Fri 1:51 PM, Nov 25, 2005&nbsp|&nbsp

Updated: Fri 1:51 PM, Nov 25, 2005

A 40-year-old Reno man is behind bars, accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of a toy geared toward the 6-and-up crowd: Lego. To haul away the evidence, agents working for the U.S. PostalInspector said they had to back a 20-foot truck to WilliamSwanberg's northern Nevada home to cart away mountains of themulticolored bricks. Swanberg was indicted Wednesday by a grand jury in Hillsboro, aPortland suburb, which charged him with stealing Legos from Targetstores in Oregon. Target estimates Swanberg stole and resold on theInternet up to $200,000 of the brick sets pilfered from theirstores in Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. When no one was looking, Swanberg switched the bar codes on Legoboxes, replacing an expensive one with a cheaper label, saidDetective Troy Dolyniuk, a member of the Washington County fraudand identity theft enforcement team. Target officials contacted police after noticing the samepattern at their stores in the five western states. A Targetsecurity guard stopped Swanberg at a Portland-area store on Nov.17, after he bought 10 boxes of the Star Wars Millennium Falconset. In his parked car, detectives found 56 of the Star Wars set,valued at $99 each, as well as 27 other Lego sets. In a laptopfound inside Swanberg's car, investigators also found the addressesof numerous Target stores in the Portland area, their locationscarefully plotted on a mapping software. Records of the Lego collector's Web site, Bricklink.Com, showthat Swanberg has sold nearly $600,000 worth of Legos since 2002,said Dolyniuk. Attempts to reach Swanberg at the Washington County jail, wherehe is being held on $250,000 bail, were unsuccessful. It's unknownat this time if he has retained an attorney. Lego's Danish founder Ole Kirk Christiansen named the famousbricks in 1934 by fusing two Danish words, "leg" and "godt"meaning "play well." Today, according to the company's Web site, children across theworld spend 5 billion hours every year playing with Lego bricks,available in 90 different colors. The bricks have long transcendedits initial purpose as just a toy and - like Crayola Crayons orBarbie - has now become a cultural symbol. There are Web sites forLego collectors and on eBay, rare Lego sets can sometimes fetchthousands. ---

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